


By Any Other Name

by roseandheather



Category: Code Black (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-09
Updated: 2016-05-09
Packaged: 2018-06-07 07:38:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,611
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6795121
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roseandheather/pseuds/roseandheather
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What's in a name?</p><p>As it turns out, everything.</p><p>Five endearments Ed has for Leanne, and the one she has for him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	By Any Other Name

**1) 'Leanne'**

Nobody says her name the way he does.

' _Lee_ -anne', he says, the lilt of stress on the first syllable. Even if she hadn't known his voice in a crowd of thousands - which she does, never mistake it - that alone would mark him singular.

She finds, perhaps to her own surprise, that she comes to love the sound of it; ' _Lee-_ anne,' lilting on his lips, or sometimes the longer form, when he reaches out to touch her hair and calls her 'Leanne Marie'. The words sound like poetry, so much said with so little, and it's so like him, the simplicity of the endearment, the way it sounds like a melody.

She's heard the name said in a British accent, in a Puerto Rican one, in the peculiar accents of New York and in classic Midwestern American English. And all of them, in their own way, have touched her heart and made her think of 'family'.

But only he has ever been able to turn her name into a lullaby.

'Leanne' is for the public, for an endearment that can't be an endearment. 'Leanne' is for Code Black and panicking residents, for patients and conferences and charity galas. It's a silent, subtle message written in the syllables of her name, as sleek and hidden and beautiful as he is, and every time she hears it, she smiles.

 

**2) 'Lea'**

The first time he calls her 'Lea', she nearly swallows her tongue.

It's entirely unexpected; to her late husband she had been 'Lee' or 'Annie', or a Classical figure of mythology (his Athena, he'd said once, and she'd laughingly asked if he didn't mean Aphrodite). Somehow Ed seems to _know,_ knows those names are off-limits; and the similarity to how he says her full name isn't lost on her.

'Lea' is for long lazy afternoons on the beach, or quiet moments curled in his office. 'Lea' is his head in her lap as she cards through his hair, nights at home in front of the fire, a laughing promise to Neal or Jesse that he'll have Cinderella home before she turns into a pumpkin.

'Lea' is for family, for sweetness, for bonfires on the beach and Fourth of July barbecues. It's her grabbing his hand and tugging him toward the waves, a laughing protest of 'Oh, Lea, you can't be serious!' subsumed into a heart-stopping kiss and the salty drench of seawater.

'Lea' is hope. 'Lea' is intimacy, is love, is a quiet caress.

'Lea' is the dream she never thought she'd have again, and she loves the syllable more every time she hears it.

 

**3) 'Sweetheart'**

She's not sure when she becomes 'sweetheart' to him, and she wishes she were. Wishes she'd memorized that moment, before he was ever more than her friend, because she knows he's used it long before he ever kisses her.

And she is always 'sweetheart', when she's any sort of generic endearment; never 'darling' or 'honey', or the shorter 'sweetie'.

When she asks him why, transparently curious, he simply shrugs and offers her a shy, baffled smile. "You don't really seem the flowery sort," he tells her, rubbing his thumb on her shoulder, "and I'm not, either. But this felt right."

"It is," she says simply, and kisses him.

'Sweetheart' is for peace, for romance, for rare displays of emotion. 'Sweetheart' is apologies and making up, fear and comfort, and quiet ballads for slow-dancing. It's "I'm sorry, sweetheart," or "Don't worry, sweetheart, I'm here."

But what she remembers most is that it's _genuine._ He never, not once, uses it patronizingly or cuttingly; instead he is always heartbreakingly sincere, as though she's the sweetest part of his life, or the steady, vital beat of his heart.

'Sweetheart', he'll call her, and she will hear 'I love you more than life'.

Sometimes, late at night when he thinks she's asleep, she'll hear him humming; 'Let me call you sweetheart', he'll sing, soft and low and, endearingly, just a little off-key, and she can't react or she'll give the whole game away, so instead she just lets the joy spread through her, trembling and sweet like first light, and lets herself melt.

 

**4) 'Dr. Rorish'**

By all rhyme or reason, it shouldn't be an endearment at all.

'Dr. Rorish' is the professional armor that has carried her through her adult life. It's a name she won't give up, and he never asks her to; he beams, radiant and joyous, the first time she answers their landline as 'Leanne Harbert', but calls her 'Dr. Rorish' on the floor without so much as batting an eyelash at it, and when she mentions it, he simply says, "I can't imagine you as anything else, here," with a soft smile that's more in his eyes than on his lips.

So 'Dr. Rorish' she stays, her first love's memory living on in the name she took just a handful of weeks out of medical school and has kept ever since.

But that doesn't stop the way he caresses the name, something intimate and personal in the oh-so-professional title.

"It's your call, Dr. Rorish," he'll say in the middle of a Code Black, and when she looks at him there will be nothing but trust in his eyes.

"What Dr. Rorish says, goes," he'll tell demanding Secret Service agents, but what she hears is _I believe in you._

"Dr. Rorish, it was my pleasure," he'll say after helping her with a particularly complex case, but what he means is _You are the most impressive person I have ever known._

'Dr. Rorish' is trust, and respect, and professional courtesy. It's friction and smoothness, courage and teamwork, healing and hope.

It's her past as much as her future, the unbroken, unbreakable thread, and when that thread twines and spins and melds with his, she doesn't feel the loss, only the gain.

It shouldn't be an endearment. And yet, somehow, it is.

 

**5) 'Baby'**

'Baby' is nothing she ever thought she'd tolerate. 'Baby' is supposed to be infantile as much as infantilizing, patronizing and ridiculous, and she wonders, sometimes, how it ever found its way into their language, because he shouldn't want to use it and she shouldn't like to hear it. He's not a patronizing man, has admitted more than once that he _likes_ the way she can pin him to the wall with no way out. He likes being outfoxed, out-thought, and just plain beaten, and he likes most of all that she's clever enough to do it without working up _too_ much of a sweat. (Except, of course, when he's playing her like a well-tuned fiddle, as much in the boardroom as in the bedroom, and they find they like that just as much, thanks ever so.)

But she does love the word, and he does keep using it, if rarely. 'Baby' is romance, it's safety, it's protection and chivalry. 'Baby' is the most profound intimacy, the only thing that he will never call her in front of anyone else, because it is _theirs._ 'Baby' is old-fashioned alpha-male protectiveness, a signal that she can surrender her strength for as long as she wishes because he will carry her through the storm.

'Baby' is for his mouth between her thighs as she falls apart on his tongue. It's for shaking and sweating and half-remembered nightmares, for huddling in his arms as he strokes her hair. 'Baby' is everything she as a modern woman should hate; but deep in her core, she can't quite give up the love of - sometimes, just sometimes - being a damsel in distress rescued by a knight in shining armor.

'Baby' is everything soft and yielding and feminine deep in the recesses of her heart, what she should be strong enough to push away but instead can only hold closer.

And finds, in the end, that she can't regret it at all.

 

**+1) 'Edward'**

Nobody ever calls him 'Edward'. He hasn't heard the name since his graduation, except when a stuffy person he doesn't know introduces him at conferences or board meetings. But 'Edward Harbert' is entirely apart from Leanne's own 'Edward'; and it's never had the grace, he thinks, that it has when she says it.

She's not much of a one for terms of endearment, Leanne. She'll call him 'Dr. Harbert' on the floor, when he seems to need a reminder that she trusts him as a doctor as much as she trusts him as anything else; but other than that, he's 'Ed' to her, or the casual 'hon' she uses with her closest friends.

To Gina he'd been 'babe', and found that it suited them; to everyone else, he has always been 'Ed'.

But he has the odd sense, when Leanne calls him 'Edward', that she is seeing more than he ever does when he looks in the mirror. It's as though she sees _him_ as 'more', and if there is an opposite of endearment, he thinks he's found it.

She says it when he asks her to marry him, there in the Parc de Bagatelle; says his name like it's a revelation, and fireworks light up in his heart. It's as though the single syllable that he is to most people just isn't _enough_ to contain all he is to her, and so she reaches for his full-formal name, and turns it into the sweetest endearment he's ever heard in his life.

He'd never thought 'Edward' would be more intimate than 'Ed'. But with Leanne, it is; and when he hears it from her lips, he finds, more than anything, that he wants to be the man he is in her eyes when she says it.


End file.
